Communist Rally Remembers 1948

By John Catalinotto, Workers World, 12 March 1998

An event in the Czech Republic in February raises anew some important
questions about the struggle for socialism— and about how the
working class needs to smash the old oppressive state, seize state
power and keep it.

These questions are even more important now that the capitalist class
controls the Czech Republic. The capitalists have turned it into a
puppet of U.S.-German-NATO imperialism. They even promise Czech troops
for use against Iraq.

Members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (SCK) and other
working-class groups rallied on Feb. 25 in Prague to commemorate the
1948 general strike that brought the Communists to power. SCK leader
Miroslav Stepan called the 1948 event a “unique, historic,
revolutionary and democratic event.”

To see the importance of this revolution, first you have to cut
through the Cold War lies of capitalist historians and media
pundits. They describe the 1948 revolution as a Communist
“coup” that made Prague captive to the USSR.

This description distorts reality. It especially understates the
active role of the Czechoslovak working class. And it avoids
discussing the constant danger Czechoslovakia faced of being absorbed
by the Western imperialist powers.

Nazi Germany had occupied and dismembered Czechoslovakia during World
War II. An active partisan movement, led by the working class, fought
the German occupation throughout the war.

By the summer of 1944, the partisans began a general uprising against
the Nazi rulers. In 1945, the Soviet Red Army entered
Czechoslovakia. With the aid of the partisans, the Red Army drove out
the Nazi German puppet government in Prague. Those who opposed the
Nazis formed a coalition government of both capitalist and
working-class parties.

The Communists won 38 percent of the vote in the 1946 election,
becoming the biggest party in the parliament. The left parties held a
slight majority.

At that point President Edvard Benes represented the Czech capitalist
class. Communist Prime Minister Klement Gottwald represented the
working class in the coalition government.

COLD WAR ON IN EARNEST

By 1948 there was no longer talk in Western capitals of “our
heroic Soviet allies.”

The imperialists, with a nuclear-armed United States at their head,
were pointing their weapons at Eastern Europe and Moscow. They would
rearm West Germany, even using the generals who served under the
Nazis.

The U.S. ruling class maneuvered against the popular Communist parties
in France and Italy. It put $20 billion into the Marshall Plan, which
became a cover for CIA-type operations and secret slush funds to
bolster the capitalist opposition.

By the end of 1948 the Communists had been pushed out of the
capitalist governments in which they had participated.

The Marshall Plan also targeted Czechoslovakia. This was the topic of
secret and public meetings between U.S. High Commissioner for West
Germany John J. McCloy and pro- capitalist members of the Czechoslovak
cabinet.

However, the Czech party had support from the USSR. Many of its own
people were in the military and police apparatus. It moved before it
could be out-maneuvered.

A popular party, the Communists had backing from most of the working
class. It could call on the workers to come out in struggle.

In February 1948, mass strikes and demonstrations forced Benes out. On
Feb. 25, 1948, some 250,000 workers assembled in Wenceslaus Square to
welcome Gottwald as head of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

But the bourgeoisie was not crushed. It began to make a comeback,
especially after a right turn in the Soviet Union in
1956. Pro-capitalist intellectuals eventually became leaders of the
Czech CP.

By 1968 a formidable counter-revolutionary movement in Czechoslovakia
tried to dismantle the socialist basis of the economy and align with
Western imperialism.

It took a military intervention by the Warsaw Pact to stop such a
reactionary development. But in 1989, the counter-revolutionary wave
in Eastern Europe succeeded, breaking up what remained of the
socialist states.

However, from 1948 to 1989 Czech technology and
manufacturing—including its military technology—had been
at the service of revolutionaries from Vietnam to Southern
Africa. Salaries among Czechs were among the most egalitarian in the
world.

Czech workers enjoyed full employment and full social benefits. The
rights of minority peoples were protected.

Just this Feb. 15, a woman became the 29th Roma victim of racist
murder since the 1989 counterrevolution, which had unleashed racist
bigotry. Unemployment has returned. And desperate to become part of
NATO, the Czech regime was one of the few in the world that offered
military forces to aid the Pentagon in its attack on Iraq.

As the Communist leader Stepan said at this February's rally, the
1948 event “launched a period of development in Czechoslovak
society.” It's a development a growing number of Czech
workers are again longing for.